Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

30 years to build a multimillion portfolio is not get rich quick.  Meanwhile. Going broke and staying unemployed for 2 decades is insanity.

It is Get Rich Quick if you are counting amounts that are due to irrational exuberance as if they are real. Today stocks are priced at two times their real value. So those counting irrational exuberance as real are pretending that their accumulated wealth is two times what it really is. Is that not a Get Rich Quick approach? Someone with $500,000 of wealth tells himself that he has $1,000,000 and makes financial plans as if that were the case? Huh?

Someone who has been building his portfolio for 30 years has experienced a great deal of real economic gains over the years. None of that is the product of Get Rich Quick thinking. But if he doesn’t make an adjustment for irrational exuberance at a time when valuations are insanely high, that’s extremely dangerous. It’s high-emotion behavior. Someone who hands in a resignation to a high-paying corporate job because he believes that irrational exuberance gains are real is hurting himself in a very serious way.

I believe that we should permit honest posting re the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research at every site. I am not able to imagine any possible downside.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

You have made the allegations of criminal acts, yet you won’t show links to those criminal acts and you won’t file chart. What are you hiding?

All that you have to do is to look at the Greaney retirement study and see if you can find a valuation adjustment in it. There isn’t one. I pointed that out in a post that I put to the Motley Fool board on May 13, 2002. It hasn’t been corrected in 23 years. There’s no way that that could happen without a lot of funny business going down.

That’s the story. We can all live better lives from this point forward by opening every site to honest posting re the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research. Or we can continue to pretend that there’s no need to practice valuation-based market timing when prices begin to get out of hand. I vote for permitting honest posting.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

If you think laws have been broken, then file charges.  Otherwise, we know those are just more made up things.

The Get Rich Quick psychology that causes people to believe that their stock portfolio is worth more than what the peer-reviewed research says it is worth also affects their views on legal actions. When we solve one of these problems, we will have solved all of them. As of today, all that we have is the peer-reviewed research we need to understand what is going on. The next step is to give ourselves permission to discuss it at every internet site. Then we will be on our way to lots of wonderful advances.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

……………you do know that this is what the whole discussion is about, right?  We need to have those millions in our account by the time we turn 60.  Being broke in your 60’s is what is the biggest concern.

The purpose of peer-reviewed research is to help us all to build our retirement accounts as big as possible as quickly as possible.

The fact that a good number of Buy-and-Holders are hotly opposed to the discussion of the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research is a very bad sign for Buy-and-Hold. It’s certainly not all Buy-and-Holders that feels that way, it’s about 10 percent who engage in abusive and in come cases criminal behavior. But the 90 percent of Normals have not spoken up strongly enough in opposition to the tactics that you Goons employ to suppress learning experiences.

If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, we never would have seen a single abusive post. I mean, come on. I don’t say that the Buy-and-Holders always knew that valuation-based market timing was of critical importance. But they certainly knew that Shiller had done something important and that we all should have been discussing the far-reaching implications of his Nobel-prize-winning research going back to the day it was published.

I believe that we are fundamentally a good people. I believe that we will get there. I think it is just too weird to have one sets of laws that applies to everything outside of the investment advice field and an entirely different set of laws that applies in the investment advice field. We’ll see.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

“Yes, it all has to be a mass conspiracy since rich people are always wanting to get investment advice from a broke guy.”

We didn’t know all there was to know about how stock investing works when Buy-and-Hold was being developed in the 1960s. Shiller didn’t publish his amazing research showing that valuations affect long-term returns until 1981. So I would chalk up the error that the Buy-and-Holders made to an understandable mistake rather than to a mass conspiracy.

Everybody doesn’t give up one way of thinking about a subject in the 24 hours after amazing breakthrough research is published. People need time to talk things over and think things over. In time, the new ideas spread. That’s where things went haywire. At some point a number of Buy-and-Holders began engaging in intimidation tactics aimed at suppressing discussion of the new research. That’s how we got to where we are today, with 44 years of peer-reviewed research ignored in almost all discussions of stock investing.

That’s what needs to change. we need to open every investing site to honest posting re the research. That way we can all get up to speed in time. I would have voted to open every site to honest posting re the research on the afternoon of May 13, 2002. I said so at the time. That way, we would be 23 years farther along in our development of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. We would all be living richer and freer and better lives today.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

Your words are empty calories.  I can spend what I have.  You can’t do that when you are broke.

You can spend what you have, Anonymous. We agree re that one.

I obviously wouldn’t be broke if there had been no abusive posting. So that one’s on you, not me.

Do you think it would have been better if I had kept it zipped re the error in the Greaney retirement study (it lacks a valuation adjustment)?

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

“My job for the last 23 years has been to open every site on the internet to honest posting re the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. “

Approximately how many sites have you managed to open up in those 23 years?

I opened every one at which we did not see abusive posting.

If Buy-and-Holders believe that Buy-and-Hold cannot survive without abusive posting, that’s a huge story in itself.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

I agree that the amount in my account will not be the same in the future as it is today.  Based on the peer-reviewed research and history, the amount should be significantly higher.  Meanwhile, your $500 million windfall will still be a fantasy.

The historical record shows that your account will grow over time. That’s because the U.S. economy will grow over time. The performance of stocks is tied to the performance of the underlying companies.

But it makes zero sense to stay at the same stock allocation at all times. Stocks carry more risk when irrational exuberance is sky high. Investors who want to Stay the Course in q meaningful way need to lower their stock allocation a bit to keep their risk profile stable over time.

Buy-and-Hold is a marketing gimmick. It suggests that irrational exuberance gains are as real as gains rooted in genuine economic growth. Investment experts should be helping investors to avoid Buy-and-Hold strategies, not suggesting that they follow them. It’s not all about turning a quick buck.

My sincere take.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

To have a secure retirement, you would need to know the answer to that.  Otherwise, you would have to stick to what has always worked (which is buy and hold).

In a world in which valuations affect long-term returns, it is a logical impossibility that a strategy that discourages valuation-based market timing could ever produce good results in the long run.

The U.S. economy has performed well for a long time. So the stock market has performed well for a long time. But an investor will always hurt himself by refusing to practice price discipline. Valuation-based market timing always adds, it can never subtract. Practicing price discipline is Stating the Course in a meaningful way.

There’s a reason why those who promote Buy-and-Hold don’t want to see the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research discussed on the internet.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-93-033623827.html

Notice the following section from this article:

The richest Americans own the vast majority of the US stock market, according to Fed data.
The top 10% of Americans held 93% of all stocks, the highest level ever recorded.
Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of Americans held just 1% of all stocks in the third quarter of 2023.

The wealthiest Americans have never owned so much of the stock market, with the top 10% now holding a record 93% of US equities, according to Federal Reserve data.

These people not only hold stock, but they also had vast amounts of Treasuries, bonds, CD’s, etc and have other sources of income. They have capitalized off of the weak hands of the market timers. They just keep buying up assets (playing out like a game of monopoly) and now we have a clear division of the have’s and have not’s. These rich people are not impact by the swings in the market. To the opposite, the market timers are left out in the cold and just complain about how unfair everything is and play the role of a victim.

It’s the people who own stocks who CAUSE price swings. The last 44 years of peer-reviewed research shows that investors must practice valuation-based market timing to keep their risk profile stable over time. If they do that, you cannot have big price swings. Every time there are price increases, investors lower their stock allocation. The sales pull prices down to reasonable levels.

Stock prices are self-regulating so long as most investors practice market timing. The problem is that there is so much money to be made in encouraging people to ignore the research and follow a Buy-and-Hold strategy.

Rob